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I come from a working-class family, and I've been working since I was 13, from babysitting to blueberry picking to factory work to bookstore work. And of course, being a mother and homemaker, the hardest work of all.

I don't have the hard everyday life that so many working mothers face.

To be in the South in my first big job was very nostalgic. There is an energy to the way we do things in the South.

My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.

I love being a mum but I do love to work too.

And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

I have worked so hard since I was 15 years old, all because I wanted to be a mom.

I'm like any working mom.

My mother was a working woman, and I was alone a lot. So I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.

I'm such a tomboy - I was raised in the South - and I also really wanted to work in New York, being so different from California, though it was a freezing-cold winter.